(1/31/2020)

From Overly Sarcastic Productions' video, Trope Talk: Beginnings!

To anyone who wants to be an author, you have to read this.

   “Everyone's taught that art is an arm's race and if your elevator pitch isn't the most eye-catching thing in the room, then your audience will drop you like the British pound.

   The fact of the matter is writers are taught not to trust their audience to have the attention span to get past page one unless somehow convinced that the quality of the entire book can be accurately represented by the prologue.

   In general, to guarantee a decent-sized audience you do need to provide your reader with things you hope will find interesting. But as assumed attention spans have shrunk, the space your goal to fit those things into is gotten smaller and smaller. ...

   There's been a sense that the competition for the audience's attention has gotten more intense, which is weird because frankly there's no universal audience. Audiences construct themselves. If you write a book, not everyone's gonna want to read it. Doesn't matter how good you write it. It's only gonna be up a few people's alleys. ...

   When you want to make something, you recognize that you're making it for an audience. You're not in competition with the other artists making stuff for that audience, you're all working together to provide a space of entertainment. ...

   The point is, the idea that your book has to win is weird. But there's been this arm's race in shrinking the size of your story's book from the first few chapters to the first chapter to the first page to the first line. It's a bid to grab the audience that might otherwise close the book before you get the good stuff.

   And I get it, but in a sense it's draining out the meaning of the story. It's like now prologue served the same purpose as the book jacket, a blurb to get you invested. I already read the book jacket, I'm already invested!

   But the other side of this arm's race is that the audience is taught to make snap judgements on entire books, and frankly that attitude is not backwards compatible. It's why people get bored with the classics and frankly it's why I do all of this. Once you know the story is interesting, you're willing to read it because you know there's good stuff in there.

    We're taught to read like we're window-shopping, that if we enjoy reading the book will just let us know right out of the gate. But if you look at the classics, there's a lot of good stuff buried under very slow introductions.

   The sheer volume of entertainment we have access to these days is staggering, but the explosion and content and accessibility is kind of created a pressure that makes it harder to enjoy a lot of that content.”